Alexander Zeldin's 'shockingly frank' retelling of Antigone

"There's a lot of Greek suffering hovering over London at the moment," said Sarah Crompton on What's On Stage. Robert Icke's new version of "Oedipus", starring Mark Strong and Lesley Manville, is about to open, and an "Elektra", with Brie Larson, is due in January. But both of them "will have to be exceptional to match the sheer cathartic power" of "The Other Place", a "very loose" retelling of "Antigone" that manages to be naturalistic yet also uncanny. Writer-director Alexander Zeldin strips away the complexities of Sophocles's plot to illuminate brilliantly why a 2,500-year-old play – about a young woman who defies her uncle, with tragic consequences – still has "universal resonance".

The action unfurls not in ancient Thebes, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times, but in a modern-day suburban home, where King Creon is Chris, his niece Antigone is Annie, and her sister Ismene is Issy. Here, Antigone has no slain brother. Instead, we join the story some years after the suicide of the girls' father – and amid a family feud about the fate of his ashes. This is "Antigone" as "modern psychodrama, digging deep into the fears, desires and taboos that surge through it. The result is both surprisingly funny and shockingly frank." Emma D'Arcy as Annie and Tobias Menzies as Chris turn in "blazing" performances as two people struggling "with a grief they can't control and a past that haunts them". 

But all the cast excel, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian, in a riveting evening that generates audible gasps of shock from the audience. The "drama is huge", though the play is lean, at 80 minutes. I'd say it's too lean, said Fiona Mountford on the i news site. In Greek tragedy, the endings bring the "purity and clarity" of catharsis. Here, too much is left unexplained. Zeldin does rather duck Sophocles's larger questions, to focus on the "foetid" relationship between Chris and Annie, said Claire Allfree in The Telegraph. Still, on its own terms, "this is sucker-punch theatre, beautifully detailed and at times excruciatingly funny". 

Lyttelton, National Theatre, London SE1. Until 9 November

by Diane Abbott     

There have always been "two sides" to Diane Abbott, said Rachel Sylvester in The Times. A fearless and "rather fun" trailblazer, she is also an "unreconstructed left-winger" who can be "self-righteous, predictable and factional". And both sides are on display in her memoir, "A Woman Like Me".

Take the chapters dealing with Jeremy Corbyn, who was her boyfriend in the late 1970s. She's "funny and candid about their relationship" – there's an amusing account of a camping holiday in France, during which he insisted on travelling on a rickety East German motorbike, and of the date he took her on to Karl Marx's tomb. But she is "less willing to face up" to his flaws as a politician; she still regards the furore about antisemitism in the Labour Party as a "conspiracy" by his enemies.

Yet Abbott's resilience is "astonishing", said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. Her teachers thought a "working-class black girl wouldn't get into Cambridge". She proved them wrong. She suffered years of abuse and battled many rejections to become the UK's first Black female MP, and was "triumphantly reelected" this year – "despite Keir Starmer's best efforts". Whatever you think of her, Abbott's story is fascinating. This is a "rich, complex memoir". 

Charismatic politician who nearly broke up the union

One of the most consequential – and divisive – politicians of his generation, Alex Salmond, who has died aged 69, transformed the Scottish National Party from a fringe party into a "formidable political force". As leader of the SNP from 1990, and later first minister, he "normalised" the cause of Scottish independence, and came within a few percentage points of breaking up the United Kingdom, said The Guardian.

The result of the referendum in 2014, at 45% to 55%, was closer than many had predicted; but it was a loss even so, and he resigned, to be replaced by his former protégée and political partner, Nicola Sturgeon. Three years later, Salmond lost his Westminster seat too. Then allegations of sexual misconduct started to resurface and, in 2018, Sturgeon's administration at Holyrood launched an official inquiry into allegations that he had sexually harassed two civil servants in 2013.

Salmond took the SNP government to court over its handling of the case, and the inquiry was ultimately deemed unlawful, owing to the fact that the official tasked with leading it had had prior contact with the complainants. By then, though, more women had come forward, and Police Scotland had become involved. In March 2020, he went on trial, said The Telegraph. The jury acquitted him of 12 charges, with the 13th (of sexual assault with intent to rape) "not proven". But his reputation was damaged by the facts that he had not disputed, and by his barrister being overheard seeming to say that he could be regarded "as a sex pest". Last year, Salmond launched a new malfeasance lawsuit against the government, and warned that a "day of reckoning" was coming.

Alex Salmond was born in Linlithgow, West Lothian, in 1954. He attended the town's academy, then read economics and history at the University of St Andrews, where he joined the SNP. After graduating, he hoped to join the BBC as a reporter. When that didn't pan out, he went to work as an economist in the Scottish Office, said The Times, where he met his future wife, Moira McGlashan. The left-wing firebrand then spent seven years working as an economist for the Royal Bank of Scotland.

In 1987, as one of his party's rising stars, he became MP for Banff and Buchan, a seat he held for the next 23 years. One of just three SNP MPs at that time, he made waves in 1988 when he interrupted Nigel Lawson's Budget speech to denounce his tax cuts as an "obscenity", and was suspended for a week. He made further headlines as a prominent critic of the poll tax (which was introduced in Scotland a year earlier than in England and Wales) and, in 1990, he succeeded Gordon Wilson as the leader of the SNP.

Seeing that the party needed to broaden its appeal, he rebranded it as centre-left, and pro-European. Then, in the late 1990s, he persuaded his party – which had previously opposed devolution – to support New Labour's creation of a Scottish Parliament, arguing for a "gradualist" approach. In the first Scottish elections in 1999, the SNP came second to Labour, led by Donald Dewar. In 2000, Salmond stood down as SNP leader to return to Westminster, where he became a trenchant critic of Tony Blair's foreign policy. But then in 2004, following a slew of poor election results, his replacement, John Swinney, resigned.

At the last minute, Salmond cut a deal with Sturgeon that would see him return as first minister with her as his number two. In 2007, the SNP beat Labour, and he became leader of a minority government. Overnight, he changed the sign on the civil service HQ from Scottish Executive to Scottish Government, said Lesley Riddoch in The Guardian. He removed bridge tolls, abolished tuition fees and scrapped prescription charges. In 2011, despite a proportional representation system that seemed to exclude the possibility, the SNP seized an outright majority. Soon after, David Cameron agreed to the referendum. Support for independence was then hovering at about 32%.

Cameron had assumed that a No vote would help kill off the SNP, but the independence campaign had seemingly galvanised many voters and, in 2015, it took 56 of Scotland's 59 seats at Westminster. But in 2017 the SNP lost support, and Salmond was among the MPs unseated. In defiance of his aides' advice, he started hosting a chat show on the Kremlin-funded RT television channel.

Following his acquittal, Salmond set up a breakaway party, Alba, with other nationalists who objected to Sturgeon's Green alliance and adoption of gender politics. It won just 1.7% of the vote in the 2021 Scottish election, and failed to win any seats. Yet its poll results had recently been improving; ever the optimist, Salmond had high hopes of returning as an MSP in 2026.